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Messenger photo courtesy of Don Cook
The Franklin Township Police Department recently took ownership of four new cruisers, which will replace two older ones that have been taken out of use. The new cruisers use a different color scheme and lettering. |
Franklin Township Police Department has four new cruisers to replace two older worn out versions. The price tag for all four new vehicles totaled $98,000, which Police Chief Michael Castle said has been paid in full.
“There are no loans. We payed for everything. The cars themselves with the radios installed and everything in them was $98,000. That’s with the new light bars and equipment in the cars and radios in the cars,” said Castle.
Castle said this time the department went with a fresh appearance for the cars.
“No only did we get new cars but we got a new look on our cars. We changed to white and got a new lettering scheme that we’re pretty proud of. We took on a whole new look this time,” said Castle.
Cruisers six and seven are totally broken down and the township trustees agreed they should be turned into scrap, due to various issues that include blown motors and transmissions.
Castle said the new cars are already in service.
“We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from everything on them. People like them, they like the looks of them, the officers are happy. They were put into service last Thursday.
The first car went on the street Thursday second shift and all four went into effect Saturday,” said Castle.
In other township news, Mark Schroeder, Vice President of Hockaden and Associates, Inc., came to the Sept. 4 meeting to give the trustees a heads up that the city of Columbus hired their firm to add new water lines to the areas of Brown Road, Hopkins Road, Bellmead Avenue, Jackson Avenue and Little Avenue, but a lot of the details are still murky.
Schroeder said the water lines are definitely old, they date back to the 1950s, but he did not know why the city chose those areas versus others.
“We prepared the plans and this project has been going around since before 2005 and the city keeps having these funding issues. The funding issues are about to get resolved and we’re going to be able to complete the construction,” said Schroeder.
Scroeder said the project had to have an approval block from the heads of the departments in both the city of Columbus and Franklin County and those entities suggested Schroeder come to the township to get the township’s approval and work out potential traffic issues.
Franklin Township Trustee Tim Guyton was concerned with how this would affect traffic issues since the project would involve Hockaden and Associates to not only be in the right-of-way but physically in the road for this project.
“We may want our roads not just capped on one side but an entire overlay. I mean, there’s a lot of things that come into play here,” said Guyton.
Guyton said the board learned their lesson from a similar project that took place on El Paso.
“The project went way longer than anticipated right through the dry part of summer, and so for all our residents on El Paso, it was just a big cloud everyday. So we didn’t have anything to keep it down, we didn’t have steel plates, we didn’t have temporary patch,” said Guyton.
Guyton requested the township get a copy of the scope of the project and a schedule so that traffic problems situations like the project on El Paso can be avoided.
Curt Ziessler, vice president of finance at Hockaden and Associates said it will probably be a six month time frame of developing designs for the project before the total cost can be accessed.
A spokesperson from the Columbus City Division of Water did not respond to answer questions about this project.
Also, the site of the former Ding Ho restaurant is requesting a liquor license under the new restaurant name, Dragon Palace Restaurant. According to trustees, when Ding Ho relocated the liquor license went with it but the owner of Dragon Palace bought an old liquor license from someone else.
“We’re only allocated so many liquor permits. She was able to purchase someone else’s liquor permit to do that. It’s not like a brand-new issue where they issue us a new one.”
The trustees approved the liquor license transfer.
